


Am I never to get away from you?

by middlemarch



Category: Sanditon (TV 2019), Sanditon - Jane Austen
Genre: Desire, F/M, Married Life, Memories, Ocean, Post-Canon, Romance, Vignette, and get to the point, and tea, in which I utterly ignore the machination necessary to get to this point, sexual awakening
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:29:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22616428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: “Mr. Parker, I assure you, you are the last person I wish to see.”Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
Relationships: Charlotte Heywood/Sidney Parker
Comments: 16
Kudos: 105





	Am I never to get away from you?

“That very nearly tickles,” Sidney said, laying his hand lightly over Charlotte’s, with just enough pressure to keep her still. It was just enough pressure to keep her from withdrawing her hand as well and she could hear the smile in his voice. She kept her cheek against his chest, tucked below his jaw.

“I’m sorry, I’ll stop,” she apologized. He’d not complained before when her hands moved lower, her fingers gently stroking the hair below his navel and his warm skin. Since they’d wed, he’d never once told her to stop touching him, only the contrary; by turns, his voice was beseeching or desperate, yearning, warm, eager. They had neither of them imagined their marriage could be achieved and so every day, it seemed a miracle. A story of fairy godmothers and hidden caskets full of treasure, of messages left in nosegays, the frog princes and swans evidence of Lady Babington’s fine hand in it all. Charlotte supposed they must disagree again some time, but she hadn’t known it would come in their bed, so early the housemaid was still sleeping and it would be hours before there was any tea to be drunk.

“I said very nearly. You needn’t stop,” he said. “Not when it seems you particularly like it.” He was asking her to say why, if she would, or to simply go on, whether or not it led to further intimacies. She felt the silkiness of his skin and the wonderful coarseness of his dark curls. Marriage had not made her less bold—or it shouldn’t, she decided.

“I could not stop thinking about it, you see. Since that day,” she said.

“That day?”

“I was searching for seashells, that day when you came out of the sea,” she explained. The memory was as vivid as ever, possibly more so with the subject beneath her hands, his voice close to her ear. There was only the fine white muslin of her night-rail between them and the linens held the scent of his body and hers, cedar and iris, but she could still smell the salt of the waves, the drifting down fragrance of the wildflowers from the cliffs.

“Yes,” he replied but he meant _Go on_.

“I’d never seen anything like that, like you,” she said. He laughed, not at all softly.

“I should hope not!”

“No, I mean, I am the elder sister of several brothers and I’d seen the farmhands stripped to the waist at the harvest,” she said. “But you…you were so confident, so beautiful, the water streaming down you—”

“I think you mean handsome, no?”

“No, I mean beautiful, I mean I couldn’t get the image of you out of my mind. Even at the most inopportune times, not just when I went to sleep at night,” she said. He’d been angry so often and short with her and it hadn’t made the least difference, she’d still see him rubbing the sea-water from his face, the light gilding his wet skin. And when he was kind, respectful, when she caught him looking at her at the London ball, in a room filled with trees, then too her wicked mind had conjured him up. 

“And it bothered you?” he asked. 

“Yes. It made me unsettled, uneasy, you see, since for a time, you almost seemed to be my enemy and then, it was even worse when I thought you might be my friend. When Lady Susan made me see I loved you,” Charlotte admitted.

“It was worse when you knew you loved me?”

“Because I hadn’t known that about love, from reading. I hadn’t known I’d want you,” she said, letting the word _want_ linger in the air. Want was always satisfied now, had been, would be, but then it had been an ache, one she could hardly acknowledge even to herself. “That it would not only be your heart and soul I loved. That I’d want to ravish you—and that I’d have ideas about how to do it. Where exactly I’d like to start. It was a fearful revelation, you see.” 

“Oh, Charlotte, there’s no one like you,” Sidney said, amused and undeniably aroused and so affectionate it was impossible to believe he’d once scolded her to tears at a ball or sneered at her in the street. “I don’t deserve you.”

“You’re lucky then, that love isn’t about getting your just desserts,” she replied. He’d lifted his hand to push back some of her hair from her shoulders. It was loose as ever, sure to need far more than the requisite hundred strokes but she’d found Sidney liked to brush it though he couldn’t manage the pins. She began to touch him again, her fingers tracing an unnamed pattern on his skin, finding the crest of his hip and the breath he took for it. 

“Neither is desire, Mr. Parker,” she added, her hand moving lower. Dinah the housemaid would leave the tea outside the door again and they’d drink the first cup of it cold, and gladly.

**Author's Note:**

> The reader may devise whatever elaborate plot is necessary to get Charlotte and Sidney from their tearful parting to this point-- I imagine Lady Susan and Lady Babington joining forces and possibly some melodramatic twists with hidden deeds or inheritances...


End file.
